Dewey, John (1986). Essays, A Common Faith. The Collected Works of John Dewey, 1882-1953.

Electronic edition. The Later Works of John Dewey, 1925-1953. Volume 9: 1933-1934. Edited by Jo
Ann Boydston, textual editor Anne Sharpe, Associate textual editor Patricia Basinger. With an
Introduction by Milton R. Konvitz . Southern Illinois University Press, Carbondale and Edwardsville.

A Common Faith

1. Religion versus the Religious

Never before in history has mankind been so much of two minds, so divided into two camps, as it is
today. Religions have traditionally been allied with ideas of the supernatural, and often have been
based upon explicit beliefs about it. Today there are many who hold that nothing worthy of being
called religious is possible apart from the supernatural. Those who hold thisbe-lief belief differ in
many respects. They range from those who accept the dogmas and sacraments of the Greek and
Roman Catholic church as the only sure means of access to the supernatural to the theist or mild
deist. Between them are the many Protestantde-nominations denominations who think the
Scriptures, aided by a purecon-science, conscience, are adequate avenues to supernatural truth and
power. But they agree in one point: the necessity for a Supernatural Being and for an immortality
that is beyond the power of nature.

The opposed group consists of those who think the advance of culture and science has completely
discredited the supernatural and with it all religions that were allied with belief in it. But they go
beyond this point. The extremists in this group believe that with elimination of the supernatural not
only must historicre-ligions religions be dismissed but with them everything of a religious nature.
When historical knowledge has discredited the claims made for the supernatural character of the
persons said to have founded historic religions; when the supernatural inspirationat-tributed
attributed to literatures held sacred has been riddled, and whenan-thropological anthropological
and psychological knowledge has disclosed the all- too-human source from which religious beliefs
and practices have sprung, everything religious must, they say, also go.

There is one idea held in common by these two opposite groups: identification of the religious with
the supernatural. The question I shall raise in these chapters concerns the ground for and the
consequences of this identification: its reasons and its

4
value. In the discussion I shall develop another conception of the nature of the religious phase of
experience, one that separates it from the supernatural and the things that have grown up about it. I
shall try to show that these derivations are encumbrances and that what is genuinely religious will
undergo anemancipa-tion emancipation when it is relieved from them; that then, for the first time,
the religious aspect of experience will be free to develop freely on its own account.

This view is exposed to attack from both the other camps. It goes contrary to traditional religions,
including those that have the greatest hold upon the religiously minded today. The viewan-nounced
announced will seem to them to cut the vital nerve of the religious element itself in taking away the
basis upon which traditionalre-ligions religions and institutions have been founded. From the other
side, the position I am taking seems like a timid halfway position, a concession and compromise
unworthy of thought that isthor-oughgoing. thoroughgoing. It is regarded as a view entertained
from mereten-dermindedness, tendermindedness, as an emotional hangover from childhoodin-
doctrination, indoctrination, or even as a manifestation of a desire to avoid disapproval and curry
favor.

The heart of my point, as far as I shall develop it in this first section, is that there is a difference
between religion, a religion, and the religious; between anything that may be denoted by a noun
substantive and the quality of experience that is designated by an adjective. It is not easy to find a
definition of religion in the substantive sense that wins general acceptance. However, in the Oxford
Dictionary I find the following: "Recognition on the part of man of some unseen higher power as
having control of his destiny and as being entitled to obedience, reverence and worship."

This particular definition is less explicit in assertion of the supernatural character of the higher
unseen power than are others that might be cited. It is, however, surcharged with implications
having their source in ideas connected with the belief in thesu-pernatural, supernatural,
characteristic of historic religions. Let us suppose that one familiar with the history of religions,
including those called primitive, compares the definition with the variety of known facts and by
means of the comparison sets out todeter-mine determine just what the definition means. I think he
will be struck by

three facts that reduce the terms of the definition to such a low common denominator that little
meaning is left.
He will note that the "unseen powers" referred to have been conceived in a multitude of
incompatible ways. Eliminating the differences, nothing is left beyond the bare reference to
something unseen and powerful. This has been conceived as the vague and undefined Mana of the
Melanesians; the Kami ofprimi-tive primitive Shintoism; the fetish of the Africans; spirits, having
some human properties, that pervade natural places and animatenatu-ral natural forces; the
ultimate and impersonal principle of Buddhism; the unmoved mover of Greek thought; the gods and
semi-divine heroes of the Greek and Roman Pantheons; the personal andlov-ing loving Providence
of Christianity, omnipotent, and limited by acor-responding corresponding evil power; the arbitrary
Will of Moslemism; thesu-preme supreme legislator and judge of deism. And these are but a few of
the outstanding varieties of ways in which the invisible power has been conceived.

There is no greater similarity in the ways in which obedience and reverence have been expressed.
There has been worship of animals, of ghosts, of ancestors, phallic worship, as well as of a Being of
dread power and of love and wisdom. Reverence has been expressed in the human sacrifices of the
Peruvians and Aztecs; the sexual orgies of some Oriental religions; exorcisms and ablutions; the
offering of the humble and contrite mind of the Hebrew prophet, the elaborate rituals of the Greek
andRo-man Roman Churches. Not even sacrifice has been uniform; it is highly sublimated in
Protestant denominations and in Moslemism. Where it has existed it has taken all kinds of forms and
beendi-rected directed to a great variety of powers and spirits. It has been used for expiation, for
propitiation and for buying special favors. There is no conceivable purpose for which rites have not
been employed.

Finally, there is no discernible unity in the moral motivations appealed to and utilized. They have
been as far apart as fear of lasting torture, hope of enduring bliss in which sexual enjoyment has
sometimes been a conspicuous element; mortification of the flesh and extreme asceticism;
prostitution and chastity; wars to extirpate the unbeliever; persecution to convert or punish theun-
believer, unbeliever, and philanthropic zeal; servile acceptance of imposed

dogma, along with brotherly love and aspiration for a reign of justice among men.

I have, of course, mentioned only a sparse number of the facts which fill volumes in any well-stocked
library. It may be asked by those who do not like to look upon the darker side of the history of
religions why the darker facts should be brought up. We all know that civilized man has a background
of bestiality andsu-perstition superstition and that these elements are still with us. Indeed, have not
some religions, including the most influential forms ofChris-tianity, Christianity, taught that the
heart of man is totally corrupt? How could the course of religion in its entire sweep not be marked by
practices that are shameful in their cruelty and lustfulness, and by beliefs that are degraded and
intellectually incredible? What else than what we find could be expected, in the case of people
having little knowledge and no secure method of knowing; with primitive institutions, and with so
little control of natural forces that they lived in a constant state of fear?

I gladly admit that historic religions have been relative to the conditions of social culture in which
peoples lived. Indeed, what I am concerned with is to press home the logic of this method of disposal
of outgrown traits of past religions. Beliefs and practices in a religion that now prevails are by this
logic relative to the present state of culture. If so much flexibility has obtained in the past regarding
an unseen power, the way it affects human destiny, and the attitudes we are to take toward it, why
should it beas-sumed assumed that change in conception and action has now come to an end? The
logic involved in getting rid of inconvenient aspects of past religions compels us to inquire how much
in religions now accepted are survivals from outgrown cultures. It compels us to ask what conception
of unseen powers and our relations to them would be consonant with the best achievements and
aspirations of the present. It demands that in imagination we wipe the slate clean and start afresh by
asking what would be the idea of the unseen, of the manner of its control over us and the ways in
which reverence and obedience would be manifested, if whatever is basically religious in experience
had the opportunity toex-press express itself free from all historic encumbrances.

So we return to the elements of the definition that has been given. What boots it to accept, in
defense of the universality of religion, a definition that applies equally to the most savage and

degraded beliefs and practices that have related to unseen powers and to noble ideals of a religion
having the greatest share of moral content? There are two points involved. One of them is that there
is nothing left worth preserving in the notions of unseen powers, controlling human destiny to which
obedience, reverence and worship are due, if we glide silently over the nature that has been
attributed to the powers, the radically diverse ways in which they have been supposed to control
human destiny, and in which submission and awe have been manifested. The other point is that
when we begin to select, to choose, and say that some present ways of thinking about the unseen
powers are better than others; that the reverence shown by a free and self- respecting human being
is better than the servile obedience rendered to an arbitrary power by frightened men; that we
should believe that control of human destiny is exercised by a wise and loving spirit rather than by
madcap ghosts or sheer forcewhen I say, we begin to choose, we have entered upon a road that
has not yet come to an end. We have reached a point that invites us to proceed farther.
For we are forced to acknowledge that concretely there is no such thing as religion in the singular.
There is only a multitude of religions. "Religion" is a strictly collective term and thecollec-tion
collection it stands for is not even of the kind illustrated in textbooks of logic. It has not the unity of a
regiment or assembly but that of any miscellaneous aggregate. Attempts to prove the universality
prove too much or too little. It is probable that religions have been universal in the sense that all the
peoples we know anything about have had a religion. But the differences among them are so great
and so shocking that any common element that can beex-tracted extracted is meaningless. The idea
that religion is universal proves too little in that the older apologists for Christianity seem to have
been better advised than some modern ones in condemning every religion but one as an impostor,
as at bottom some kind of demon worship or at any rate a superstitious figment. Choice among
religions is imperative, and the necessity for choice leaves nothing of any force in the argument from
universality.More-over, Moreover, when once we enter upon the road of choice, there is at once
presented a possibility not yet generally realized.

For the historic increase of the ethical and ideal content ofreli-gions religions suggests that the
process of purification may be carriedfur-ther.

further. It indicates that further choice is imminent in which certain values and functions in
experience may be selected. Thispossibil-ity possibility is what I had in mind in speaking of the
difference between the religious and a religion. I am not proposing a religion, but rather the
emancipation of elements and outlooks that may be called religious. For the moment we have a
religion, whether that of the Sioux Indian or of Judaism or of Christianity, that moment the ideal
factors in experience that may be called religious take on a load that is not inherent in them, a load
of current beliefs and of institutional practices that are irrelevant to them.

I can illustrate what I mean by a common phenomenon incon-temporary contemporary life. It is

widely supposed that a person who does not accept any religion is thereby shown to be a non-
religiousper-son. person. Yet it is conceivable that the present depression in religion is closely
connected with the fact that religions now prevent,be-cause because of their weight of historic
encumbrances, the religious quality of experience from coming to consciousness and finding the
expression that is appropriate to present conditions,intellec-tual intellectual and moral. I believe
that such is the case. I believe that many persons are so repelled from what exists as a religion by
itsintel-lectual intellectual and moral implications, that they are not even aware of attitudes in
themselves that if they came to fruition would be genuinely religious. I hope that this remark may
help make clear what I mean by the distinction between "religion" as a nounsub-stantive
substantive and "religious" as adjectival.
To be somewhat more explicit, a religion (and as I have just said there is no such thing as religion in
general) always signifies a special body of beliefs and practices having some kind ofin-stitutional
institutional organization, loose or tight. In contrast, the adjective "religious" denotes nothing in the
way of a specifiable entity,ei-ther either institutional or as a system of beliefs. It does not
denoteany-thing anything to which one can specifically point as one can point to this and that
historic religion or existing church. For it does notde-note denote anything that can exist by itself or
that can be organized into a particular and distinctive form of existence. It denotesatti-tudes
attitudes that may be taken toward every object and every proposed end or ideal.

Before, however, I develop my suggestion that realization of the distinction just made would operate
to emancipate thereli-gious religious quality from encumbrances that now smother or limit it, I

must refer to a position that in some respects is similar in words to the position I have taken, but that
in fact is a whole world removed from it. I have several times used the phrase "religious elements of
experience." Now at present there is much talk,espe-cially especially in liberal circles, of religious
experience as vouching for the authenticity of certain beliefs and the desirability of certainprac-tices,
practices, such as particular forms of prayer and worship. It is even asserted that religious experience
is the ultimate basis of religion itself. The gulf between this position and that which I have taken is
what I am now concerned to point out.

Those who hold to the notion that there is a definite kind of experience which is itself religious, by
that very fact make out of it something specific, as a kind of experience that is marked off from
experience as aesthetic, scientific, moral, political; fromex-perience experience as companionship
and friendship. But "religious" as a quality of experience signifies something that may belong to all
these experiences. It is the polar opposite of some type ofexperi-ence experience that can exist by
itself. The distinction comes out clearly when it is noted that the concept of this distinct kind
ofexperi-ence experience is used to validate a belief in some special kind of object and also to justify
some special kind of practice.

For there are many religionists who are now dissatisfied with the older "proofs" of the existence of
God, those that go by the name of ontological, cosmological and teleological. The cause of the
dissatisfaction is perhaps not so much the arguments that Kant used to show the insufficiency of
these alleged proofs, as it is the growing feeling that they are too formal to offer anysup-port
support to religion in action. Anyway, the dissatisfaction exists. Moreover, these religionists are
moved by the rise of theexperi-mental experimental method in other fields. What is more natural
and proper, accordingly, than that they should affirm they are just as good empiricists as anybody
elseindeed, as good as the scientists themselves? As the latter rely upon certain kinds of
experience to prove the existence of certain kinds of objects, so the religionists rely upon a certain
kind of experience to prove the existence of the object of religion, especially the supreme object,
God.

The discussion may be made more definite by introducing, at this point, a particular illustration of
this type of reasoning. A writer says: "I broke down from overwork and soon came to the verge of
nervous prostration. One morning after a long and

10

sleepless night . . . I resolved to stop drawing upon myself so continuously and begin drawing upon
God. I determined to set apart a quiet time every day in which I could relate my life to its Ultimate
Source, regain the consciousness that in God I live, move and have my being. That was thirty years
ago. Since then I have had literally not one hour of darkness or despair."

This is an impressive record. I do not doubt its authenticity nor that of the experience related. It
illustrates a religious aspect of experience. But it illustrates also the use of that quality to carry a
superimposed load of a particular religion. For having been brought up in the Christian religion, its
subject interprets it in the terms of the personal God characteristic of that religion. Taoists, Buddhists,
Moslems, persons of no religion including those who reject all supernatural influence and power,
have had experiences similar in their effect. Yet another authorcomment-ing commenting upon the
passage says: "The religious expert can be more sure that this God exists than he can of either the
cosmological God of speculative surmise or the Christlike God involved in the validity of moral
optimism," and goes on to add that suchexperi-ences experiences "mean that God the Savior, the
Power that gives victory over sin on certain conditions that man can fulfill, is an existent, accessible
and scientifically knowable reality." It should be clear that this inference is sound only if the
conditions, of whatever sort, that produce the effect are called "God." But most readers will take the
inference to mean that the existence of a particular Being, of the type called "God" in the Christian
religion, is proved by a method akin to that of experimental science.

In reality, the only thing that can be said to be "proved" is the existence of some complex of
conditions that have operated to effect an adjustment in life, an orientation, that brings with it a
sense of security and peace. The particular interpretation given to this complex of conditions is not
inherent in the experience itself. It is derived from the culture with which a particularper-son person
has been imbued. A fatalist will give one name to it; aChris-tian Christian Scientist another, and the
one who rejects all supernatural being still another. The determining factor in the interpretation of
the experience is the particular doctrinal apparatus into which a person has been inducted. The
emotional deposit connected with prior teaching floods the whole situation. It may readily confer
upon the experience such a peculiarly sacred preciousness

11

that all inquiry into its causation is barred. The stable outcome is so invaluable that the cause to
which it is referred is usually nothing but a reduplication of the thing that has occurred, plus some
name that has acquired a deeply emotional quality.

The intent of this discussion is not to deny the genuineness of the result nor its importance in life. It
is not, save incidentally, to point out the possibility of a purely naturalistic explanation of the event.
My purpose is to indicate what happens whenreli-gious religious experience is already set aside as
something sui generis. The actual religious quality in the experience described is the effect produced,
the better adjustment in life and its conditions, not the manner and cause of its production. The way
in which the experience operated, its function, determines its religious value. If the reorientation
actually occurs, it, and the sense ofse-curity security and stability accompanying it, are forces on
their ownac-count. account. It takes place in different persons in a multitude of ways. It is
sometimes brought about by devotion to a cause; sometimes by a passage of poetry that opens a
new perspective; sometimes as was the case with Spinozadeemed an atheist in his day through
philosophical reflection.

The difference between an experience having a religious force because of what it does in and to the
processes of living andreli-gious religious experience as a separate kind of thing gives me occasion to
refer to a previous remark. If this function were rescued through emancipation from dependence
upon specific types of beliefs and practices, from those elements that constitute a religion, many
individuals would find that experiences having the force ofbring-ing bringing about a better, deeper
and enduring adjustment in life are not so rare and infrequent as they are commonly supposed to be.
They occur frequently in connection with many significantmo-ments moments of living. The idea of
invisible powers would take on the meaning of all the conditions of nature and human association
that support and deepen the sense of values which carry one through periods of darkness and
despair to such an extent that they lose their usual depressive character.

I do not suppose for many minds the dislocation of thereli-gious religious from a religion is easy to
effect. Tradition and custom,es-pecially especially when emotionally charged, are a part of the
habits that have become one with our very being. But the possibility of the transfer is demonstrated
by its actuality. Let us then for themo-ment
 12

moment drop the term "religious," and ask what are the attitudes that lend deep and enduring
support to the processes of living. I have, for example, used the words "adjustment" and"orienta-
tion." "orientation." What do they signify?

While the words "accommodation," "adaptation," and"ad-justment" "adjustment" are frequently

employed as synonyms, attitudes exist that are so different that for the sake of clear thought they
should be discriminated. There are conditions we meet that cannot be changed. If they are particular
and limited, we modify our own particular attitudes in accordance with them. Thus weaccom-
modate accommodate ourselves to changes in weather, to alterations in income when we have no
other recourse. When the external conditions are lasting we become inured, habituated, or, as the
process is now often called, conditioned. The two main traits of thisatti-tude, attitude, which I
should like to call accommodation, are that itaf-fects affects particular modes of conduct, not the
entire self, and that the process is mainly passive. It may, however, become general and then it
becomes fatalistic resignation or submission. There are other attitudes toward the environment that
are alsoparticu-lar particular but that are more active. We re-act against conditions anden-deavor
endeavor to change them to meet our wants and demands. Plays in a foreign language are "adapted"
to meet the needs of anAmeri-can American audience. A house is rebuilt to suit changed conditions
of the household; the telephone is invented to serve the demand for speedy communication at a
distance; dry soils are irrigated so that they may bear abundant crops. Instead of accommodating
ourselves to conditions, we modify conditions so that they will be accommodated to our wants and
purposes. This process may be called adaptation.

Now both of these processes are often called by the moregen-eral general name of adjustment. But
there are also changes in ourselves in relation to the world in which we live that are much morein-
clusive inclusive and deep seated. They relate not to this and that want in relation to this and that
condition of our surroundings, butper-tain pertain to our being in its entirety. Because of their scope,
thismodi-fication modification of ourselves is enduring. It lasts through any amount of vicissitude of
circumstances, internal and external. There is a composing and harmonizing of the various elements
of our being such that, in spite of changes in the special conditions thatsur-round surround us, these
conditions are also arranged, settled, in relation

13

to us. This attitude includes a note of submission. But it isvolun-tary, voluntary, not externally
imposed; and as voluntary it is something more than a mere Stoical resolution to endure
unperturbed throughout the buffetings of fortune. It is more outgoing, more ready and glad, than
the latter attitude, and it is more active than the former. And in calling it voluntary, it is not meant
that itde-pends depends upon a particular resolve or volition. It is a change of will conceived as the
organic plenitude of our being, rather than any special change in will.

It is the claim of religions that they effect this generic anden-during enduring change in attitude. I
should like to turn the statement around and say that whenever this change takes place there is a
definitely religious attitude. It is not a religion that brings it about, but when it occurs, from whatever
cause and by whatever means, there is a religious outlook and function. As I have said before, the
doctrinal or intellectual apparatus and theinstitu-tional institutional accretions that grow up are, in a
strict sense, adventitious to the intrinsic quality of such experiences. For they are affairs of the
traditions of the culture with which individuals areinocu-lated. inoculated. Mr. Santayana has
connected the religious quality ofexpe-rience experience with the imaginative, as that is expressed
in poetry."Reli-gion "Religion and poetry," he says, "are identical in essence, and differ merely in the
way in which they are attached to practical affairs. Poetry is called religion when it intervenes in life,
and religion, when it merely supervenes upon life, is seen to be nothing but poetry." The difference
between intervening in and supervening upon is as important as is the identity set forth. Imagination
may play upon life or it may enter profoundly into it. As Mr. Santayana puts it, "poetry has a
universal and a moral function," for "its highest power lies in its relevance to the ideals and purposes
of life." Except as it intervenes, "all observation is observation of brute fact, all discipline is mere
repression, until these factsdi-gested digested and this discipline embodied in humane impulses
become the starting-point for a creative movement of the imagination, the firm basis for ideal
constructions in society, religion, and art."

If I may make a comment upon this penetrating insight of Mr. Santayana, I would say that the
difference between imagination that only supervenes and imagination that intervenes is thedif-
ference difference between one that completely interpenetrates all theele-ments elements of our
being and one that is interwoven with only special

14

and partial factors. There actually occurs extremely littleobser-vation observation of brute facts
merely for the sake of the facts, just as there is little discipline that is repression and nothing but
repression. Facts are usually observed with reference to some practical end and purpose, and that
end is presented only imaginatively. The most repressive discipline has some end in view to which
there is at least imputed an ideal quality; otherwise it is purely sadistic. But in such cases of
observation and discipline imagination is limited and partial. It does not extend far; it does not
permeate deeply and widely.
The connection between imagination and the harmonizing of the self is closer than is usually thought.
The idea of a whole, whether of the whole personal being or of the world, is animag-inative,
imaginative, not a literal, idea. The limited world of our observation and reflection becomes the
Universe only through imaginative extension. It cannot be apprehended in knowledge nor realized in
reflection. Neither observation, thought, nor practical activity can attain that complete unification of
the self which is called a whole. The whole self is an ideal, an imaginative projection. Hence the idea
of a thoroughgoing and deep-seated harmonizing of the self with the Universe (as a name for the
totality ofcondi-tions conditions with which the self is connected) operates only through
imaginationwhich is one reason why this composing of the self is not voluntary in the sense of an
act of special volition orreso-lution. resolution. An "adjustment" possesses the will rather than is
itsex-press express product. Religionists have been right in thinking of it as an influx from sources
beyond conscious deliberation andpur-pose purposea fact that helps explain, psychologically, why
it has so generally been attributed to a supernatural source and that,per-haps, perhaps, throws
some light upon the reference of it by William James to unconscious factors. And it is pertinent to
note that the unification of the self throughout the ceaseless flux of what it does, suffers, and
achieves, cannot be attained in terms of itself. The self is always directed toward something beyond
itself and so its own unification depends upon the idea of the integration of the shifting scenes of the
world into that imaginative totality we call the Universe.

The intimate connection of imagination with ideal elements in experience is generally recognized.
Such is not the case withre-spect respect to its connection with faith. The latter has been regarded
as

15

a substitute for knowledge, for sight. It is defined, in theChris-tian Christian religion, as evidence of
things not seen. The implication is that faith is a kind of anticipatory vision of things that are now
invisible because of the limitations of our finite and erring nature. Because it is a substitute for
knowledge, its material and object are intellectual in quality. As John Locke summed up the matter,
faith is "assent to a proposition . . . on the credit of itspro-poser." proposer." Religious faith is then
given to a body of propositions as true on the credit of their supernatural author, reason coming in to
demonstrate the reasonableness of giving such credit. Ofne-cessity necessity there results the
development of theologies, or bodies of systematic propositions, to make explicit in organized form
the content of the propositions to which belief is attached and assent given. Given the point of view,
those who hold that religionnec-essarily necessarily implies a theology are correct.

But belief or faith has also a moral and practical import. Even devils, according to the older
theologians, believeand tremble. A distinction was made, therefore, between "speculative" orin-
tellectual intellectual belief and an act called "justifying" faith. Apart from any theological context,
there is a difference between belief that is a conviction that some end should be supreme over
conduct, and belief that some object or being exists as a truth for theintel-lect. intellect. Conviction
in the moral sense signifies being conquered, vanquished, in our active nature by an ideal end; it
signifies acknowledgment of its rightful claim over our desires andpur-poses. purposes. Such
acknowledgment is practical, not primarilyintel-lectual. intellectual. It goes beyond evidence that
can be presented to any possible observer. Reflection, often long and arduous, may bein-volved
involved in arriving at the conviction, but the import of thought is not exhausted in discovery of
evidence that can justifyintellec-tual intellectual assent. The authority of an ideal over choice and
conduct is the authority of an ideal, not of a fact, of a truth guaranteed to intellect, not of the status
of the one who propounds the truth.

Such moral faith is not easy. It was questioned of old whether the Son of Man should find faith on
the earth in his coming. Moral faith has been bolstered by all sorts of arguments intended to prove
that its object is not ideal and that its claim upon us is not primarily moral or practical, since the ideal
in question isal-ready already embedded in the existent frame of things. It is argued that the ideal is
already the final reality at the heart of things that

16

exist, and that only our senses or the corruption of our natures prevent us from apprehending its
prior existential being.Start-ing, Starting, say, from such an idea as that justice is more than a moral
ideal because it is embedded in the very make-up of the actually existent world, men have gone on
to build up vast intellectual schemes, philosophies, and theologies, to prove that ideals are real not
as ideals but as antecedently existing actualities. They have failed to see that in converting moral
realities into matters of intellectual assent they have evinced lack of moral faith. Faith that
something should be in existence as far as lies in our power is changed into the intellectual belief that
it is already in existence. When physical existence does not bear out theasser-tion, assertion, the
physical is subtly changed into the metaphysical. In this way, moral faith has been inextricably tied up
with intellectual beliefs about the supernatural.

The tendency to convert ends of moral faith and action into articles of an intellectual creed has been
furthered by a tendency of which psychologists are well aware. What we ardently desire to have thus
and so, we tend to believe is already so. Desire has a powerful influence upon intellectual beliefs.
Moreover, when conditions are adverse to realization of the objects of ourde-sire desireand in the
case of significant ideals they are extremelyad-verse adverseit is an easy way out to assume that
after all they areal-ready already embodied in the ultimate structure of what is, and that
appearances to the contrary are merely appearances.Imagina-tion Imagination then merely
supervenes and is freed from the responsibility for intervening. Weak natures take to reverie as a
refuge as strong ones do to fanaticism. Those who dissent are mourned over by the first class and
converted through the use of force by the second.
What has been said does not imply that all moral faith in ideal ends is by virtue of that fact religious
in quality. The religious is "morality touched by emotion" only when the ends of moral conviction
arouse emotions that are not only intense but areac-tuated actuated and supported by ends so
inclusive that they unify the self. The inclusiveness of the end in relation to both self and the
"universe" to which an inclusive self is related is indispensable. According to the best authorities,
"religion" comes from a root that means being bound or tied. Originally, it meant being bound by
vows to a particular way of lifeas les religieux were monks

17

and nuns who had assumed certain vows. The religious attitude signifies something that is bound
through imagination to agen-eral general attitude. This comprehensive attitude, moreover, is much
broader than anything indicated by "moral" in its usual sense. The quality of attitude is displayed in
art, science and good citizenship.

If we apply the conception set forth to the terms of thedefini-tion definition earlier quoted, these
terms take on a new significance. An unseen power controlling our destiny becomes the power of an
ideal. All possibilities, as possibilities, are ideal in character. The artist, scientist, citizen, parent, as far
as they are actuated by the spirit of their callings, are controlled by the unseen. For allen-deavor
endeavor for the better is moved by faith in what is possible, not by adherence to the actual. Nor
does this faith depend for itsmov-ing moving power upon intellectual assurance or belief that the
things worked for must surely prevail and come into embodied existence. For the authority of the
object to determine ouratti-tude attitude and conduct, the right that is given it to claim our
allegiance and devotion is based on the intrinsic nature of the ideal. The outcome, given our best
endeavor, is not with us. The inherent vice of all intellectual schemes of idealism is that they convert
the idealism of action into a system of beliefs about antecedentreal-ity. reality. The character
assigned this reality is so different from that which observation and reflection lead to and support
that these schemes inevitably glide into alliance with the supernatural.

All religions, marked by elevated ideal quality, have dwelt upon the power of religion to introduce
perspective into the piecemeal and shifting episodes of existence. Here too we need to reverse the
ordinary statement and say that whatever introduces genuine perspective is religious, not that
religion is something thatintro-duces introduces it. There can be no doubt (referring to the second
element of the definition) of our dependence upon forces beyond ourcon-trol. control. Primitive
man was so impotent in the face of these forces that, especially in an unfavorable natural
environment, fearbe-came became a dominant attitude, and, as the old saying goes, fearcre-ated
created the gods.
With increase of mechanisms of control, the element of fear has, relatively speaking, subsided. Some
optimistic souls have even concluded that the forces about us are on the wholeessen-tially
essentially benign. But every crisis, whether of the individual or of the

18

community, reminds man of the precarious and partial nature of the control he exercises. When man,
individually andcollec-tively, collectively, has done his uttermost, conditions that at different times
and places have given rise to the ideas of Fate and Fortune, of Chance and Providence, remain. It is
the part of manliness toin-sist insist upon the capacity of mankind to strive to direct natural and
social forces to humane ends. But unqualified absolutisticstate-ments statements about the
omnipotence of such endeavors reflect egoism rather than intelligent courage.

The fact that human destiny is so interwoven with forcesbe-yond beyond human control renders it
unnecessary to suppose thatde-pendence dependence and the humility that accompanies it have to
find the particular channel that is prescribed by traditional doctrines. What is especially significant is
rather the form which the sense of dependence takes. Fear never gave stable perspective in the life
of anyone. It is dispersive and withdrawing. Most religions have in fact added rites of communion to
those of expiation andpro-pitiation. propitiation. For our dependence is manifested in those
relations to the environment that support our undertakings and aspirations as much as it is in the
defeats inflicted upon us. The essentially unreligious attitude is that which attributes human
achievement and purpose to man in isolation from the world of physical nature and his fellows. Our
successes are dependent upon theco-operation cooperation of nature. The sense of the dignity of
human nature is as religious as is the sense of awe and reverence when it rests upon a sense of
human nature as a cooperating part of a larger whole. Natural piety is not of necessity either a
fatalisticacquies-cence acquiescence in natural happenings or a romantic idealization of the world. It
may rest upon a just sense of nature as the whole of which we are parts, while it also recognizes that
we are parts that are marked by intelligence and purpose, having the capacity to strive by their aid to
bring conditions into greater consonance with what is humanly desirable. Such piety is an
inherentconstit-uent constituent of a just perspective in life.

Understanding and knowledge also enter into a perspective that is religious in quality. Faith in the
continued disclosing of truth through directed cooperative human endeavor is morereli-gious
religious in quality than is any faith in a completed revelation. It is of course now usual to hold that
revelation is not completed in the sense of being ended. But religions hold that the essential

19
framework is settled in its significant moral features at least, and that new elements that are offered
must be judged by conformity to this framework. Some fixed doctrinal apparatus is necessary for a
religion. But faith in the possibilities of continued andrig-orous rigorous inquiry does not limit access
to truth to any channel or scheme of things. It does not first say that truth is universal and then add
there is but one road to it. It does not depend foras-surance assurance upon subjection to any
dogma or item of doctrine. It trusts that the natural interactions between man and hisenviron-ment
environment will breed more intelligence and generate more knowledge provided the scientific
methods that define intelligence inopera-tion operation are pushed further into the mysteries of the
world, being themselves promoted and improved in the operation. There is such a thing as faith in
intelligence becoming religious in qualitya fact that perhaps explains the efforts of somereli-
gionists religionists to disparage the possibilities of intelligence as a force. They properly feel such
faith to be a dangerous rival.

Lives that are consciously inspired by loyalty to such ideals as have been mentioned are still
comparatively infrequent to theex-tent extent of that comprehensiveness and intensity which
arouse anar-dor ardor religious in function. But before we infer the incompetency of such ideals and
of the actions they inspire, we should at least ask ourselves how much of the existing situation is due
to the fact that the religious factors of experience have been drafted into supernatural channels and
thereby loaded with irrelevant encumbrances. A body of beliefs and practices that are apart from the
common and natural relations of mankind must, in the degree in which it is influential, weaken and
sap the force of the possibilities inherent in such relations. Here lies one aspect of the emancipation
of the religious from religion.

Any activity pursued in behalf of an ideal end against obstacles and in spite of threats of personal loss
because of conviction of its general and enduring value is religious in quality. Many a person, inquirer,
artist, philanthropist, citizen, men and women in the humblest walks of life, have achieved, without
presumption and without display, such unification of themselves and of theirrela-tions relations to
the conditions of existence. It remains to extend their spirit and inspiration to ever wider numbers. If
I have saidany-thing anything about religions and religion that seems harsh, I have said those things
because of a firm belief that the claim on the part of

20

religions to possess a monopoly of ideals and of the supernatural means by which alone, it is alleged,
they can be furthered, stands in the way of the realization of distinctively religious valuesin-herent
inherent in natural experience. For that reason, if for no other, I should be sorry if any were misled by
the frequency with which I have employed the adjective "religious" to conceive of what I have said as
a disguised apology for what have passed asreli-gions. religions. The opposition between religious
values as I conceive them and religions is not to be bridged. Just because the release of these values
is so important, their identification with the creeds and cults of religions must be dissolved.

21

2. Faith and Its Object All religions, as I pointed out in the precedingchap-ter, chapter, involve
specific intellectual beliefs, and they attachsome greater, some lessimportance to assent to
these doctrines as true, true in the intellectual sense. They have literatures heldes-pecially especially
sacred, containing historical material with which theva-lidity validity of the religions is connected.
They have developed adoc-trinal doctrinal apparatus it is incumbent upon "believers" (with varying
degrees of strictness in different religions) to accept. They also insist that there is some special and
isolated channel of access to the truths they hold.

No one will deny, I suppose, that the present crisis in religion is intimately bound up with these
claims. The skepticism andag-nosticism agnosticism that are rife and that from the standpoint of
thereli-gionist religionist are fatal to the religious spirit are directly bound up with the intellectual
contents, historical, cosmological, ethical, and theological, asserted to be indispensable in everything
religious. There is no need for me here to go with any minuteness into the causes that have
generated doubt and disbelief, uncertainty and rejection, as to these contents. It is enough to point
out that all the beliefs and ideas in question, whether having to do withhis-torical historical and
literary matters, or with astronomy, geology andbiol-ogy, biology, or with the creation and structure
of the world and man, are connected with the supernatural, and that this connection is the factor
that has brought doubt upon them; the factor that from the standpoint of historic and institutional
religions issap-ping sapping the religious life itself.

The obvious and simple facts of the case are that some views about the origin and constitution of the
world and man, some views about the course of human history and personages andin-cidents
incidents in that history, have become so interwoven with religion as to be identified with it. On the
other hand, the growth of

22

knowledge and of its methods and tests has been such as to make acceptance of these beliefs
increasingly onerous and evenimpos-sible impossible for large numbers of cultivated men and
women. With such persons, the result is that the more these ideas are used as the basis and
justification of a religion, the more dubious thatreli-gion religion becomes.

Protestant denominations have largely abandoned the idea that particular ecclesiastic sources can
authoritatively determine cosmic, historic and theological beliefs. The more liberal among them have
at least mitigated the older belief that individualhard-ness hardness and corruption of heart are the
causes of intellectualrejec-tion rejection of the intellectual apparatus of the Christian religion. But
these denominations have also, with exceptions numericallyin-significant, insignificant, retained a
certain indispensable minimum ofintellec-tual intellectual content. They ascribe peculiar religious
force to certainliter-ary literary documents and certain historic personages. Even when they have
greatly reduced the bulk of intellectual content to beac-cepted, accepted, they have insisted at least
upon theism and theimmor-tality immortality of the individual.

It is no part of my intention to rehearse in any detail the weighty facts that collectively go by the
name of the conflict of science and religiona conflict that is not done away with by calling it a
conflict of science with theology, as long as even a minimum of intellectual assent is prescribed as
essential. Theim-pact impact of astronomy not merely upon the older cosmogony ofreli-gion
religion but upon elements of creeds dealing with historic events witness the idea of ascent into
heavenis familiar. Geological discoveries have displaced creation myths which once bulked large.
Biology has revolutionized conceptions of soul and mind which once occupied a central place in
religious beliefs and ideas, and this science has made a profound impression upon ideas of sin,
redemption, and immortality. Anthropology, history andlit-erary literary criticism have furnished a
radically different version of the historic events and personages upon which Christian religions have
built. Psychology is already opening to us naturalexplana-tions explanations of phenomena so
extraordinary that once theirsupernatu-ral supernatural origin was, so to say, the natural
explanation.

The significant bearing for my purpose of all this is that new methods of inquiry and reflection have
become for the educated man today the final arbiter of all questions of fact, existence, and

23

intellectual assent. Nothing less than a revolution in the "seat of intellectual authority" has taken
place. This revolution, rather than any particular aspect of its impact upon this and thatreli-gious
religious belief, is the central thing. In this revolution, every defeat is a stimulus to renewed inquiry;
every victory won is the open door to more discoveries, and every discovery is a new seed planted in
the soil of intelligence, from which grow fresh plants with new fruits. The mind of man is being
habituated to a new method and ideal: There is but one sure road of access to truth the road of
patient, cooperative inquiry operating by means of observation, experiment, record and controlled
reflection.

The scope of the change is well illustrated by the fact that whenever a particular outpost is
surrendered it is usually met by the remark from a liberal theologian that the particular doctrine or
supposed historic or literary tenet surrendered was never, after all, an intrinsic part of religious belief,
and that without it the true nature of religion stands out more clearly than before. Equally significant
is the growing gulf between fundamentalists and liberals in the churches. What is not realized
althoughper-haps perhaps it is more definitely seen by fundamentalists than byliber-als liberalsis
that the issue does not concern this and that piecemeal item of belief, but centres in the question of
the method by which any and every item of intellectual belief is to be arrived at and justified.

The positive lesson is that religious qualities and values if they are real at all are not bound up with
any single item ofintellec-tual intellectual assent, not even that of the existence of the God of theism;
and that, under existing conditions, the religious function in experience can be emancipated only
through surrender of the whole notion of special truths that are religious by their own nature,
together with the idea of peculiar avenues of access to such truths. For were we to admit that there
is but one method for ascertaining fact and truththat conveyed by the word"sci-entific"
"scientific" in its most general and generous senseno discovery in any branch of knowledge and
inquiry could then disturb the faith that is religious. I should describe this faith as theunifica-tion
unification of the self through allegiance to inclusive ideal ends, which imagination presents to us
and to which the human will responds as worthy of controlling our desires and choices.

It is probably impossible to imagine the amount of intellectual

24

energy that has been diverted from normal processes of arriving at intellectual conclusions because
it has gone intorationaliza-tion rationalization of the doctrines entertained by historic religions. The
set that has thus been given the general mind is much more harmful, to my mind, than are the
consequences of any one particular item of belief, serious as have been those flowing fromaccep-
tance acceptance of some of them. The modern liberal version of theintellec-tual intellectual
content of Christianity seems to the modern mind to be more rational than some of the earlier
doctrines that have been reacted against. Such is not the case in fact. The theologicalphi-losophers
philosophers of the Middle Ages had no greater difficulty in giving rational form to all the doctrines
of the Roman church than has the liberal theologian of today in formulating and justifyingin-
tellectually intellectually the doctrines he entertains. This statement is asap-plicable applicable to
the doctrine of continuing miracles, penance,indul-gences, indulgences, saints and angels, etc., as to
the trinity, incarnation, atonement, and the sacraments. The fundamental question, Ire-peat, repeat,
is not of this and that article of intellectual belief but ofin-tellectual intellectual habit, method and
criterion.

One method of swerving aside the impact of changedknowl-edge knowledge and method upon the
intellectual content of religion is the method of division of territory and jurisdiction into two parts.
Formerly these were called the realm of nature and the realm of grace. They are now often known as
those of revelation and natural knowledge. Modern religious liberalism has no definite names for
them, save, perhaps, the division, referred to in the last chapter, between scientific and religious
experience. Theimplica-tion implication is that in one territory the supremacy of scientific
knowledge must be acknowledged, while there is another region, not very precisely defined, of
intimate personal experience wherein other methods and criteria hold sway.

This method of justifying the peculiar and legitimate claim of certain elements of belief is always
open to the objection that a positive conclusion is drawn from a negative fact. Existingigno-rance
ignorance or backwardness is employed to assert the existence of a division in the nature of the
subject-matter dealt with. Yet the gap may only reflect, at most, a limitation now existing but in
thefu-ture future to be done away with. The argument that because some province or aspect of
experience has not yet been "invaded" by scientific methods, it is not subject to them, is as old as it
isdan-gerous.

25

dangerous. Time and time again, in some particular reserved field, it has been invalidated.
Psychology is still in its infancy. He is bold to the point of rashness who asserts that intimate
personalexpe-rience experience will never come within the ken of natural knowledge.

It is more to the present point, however, to consider the region that is claimed by religionists as a
special reserve. It is mystical experience. The difference, however, between mystic experience and
the theory about it that is offered to us must be noted. The experience is a fact to be inquired into.
The theory, like anythe-ory, theory, is an interpretation of the fact. The idea that by its very nature
the experience is a veridical realization of the directpres-ence presence of God does not rest so
much upon examination of the facts as it does upon importing into their interpretation a conception
that is formed outside them. In its dependence upon a priorcon-ception conception of the
supernatural, which is the thing to be proved, it begs the question.
History exhibits many types of mystic experience, and each of these types is contemporaneously
explained by the concepts that prevail in the culture and the circle in which the phenomena occur.
There are mystic crises that arise, as among some North American Indian tribes, induced by fasting.
They areaccom-panied accompanied by trances and semi-hysteria. Their purpose is to gain some
special power, such perhaps as locating a person who is lost or finding objects that have been
secreted. There is the mysticism of Hindoo practice now enjoying some vogue in Westerncoun-tries.
countries. There is the mystic ecstasy of Neoplatonism with itscom-plete complete abrogation of the
self and absorption into an impersonal whole of Being. There is the mysticism of intense
aestheticexpe-rience experience independent of any theological or metaphysicalinter-pretation.
interpretation. There is the heretical mysticism of William Blake. There is the mysticism of sudden
unreasoning fear in which the very foundations seem shaken beneath oneto mention but a few of
the types that may be found.

What common element is there between, say, the Neoplatonic conception of a super-divine Being
wholly apart from human needs and conditions and the medieval theory of an immediate union that
is fostered through attention to the sacraments or through concentration upon the heart of Jesus?
Thecontempo-rary contemporary emphasis of some Protestant theologians upon the sense of inner
personal communion with God, found in religiousexperi-ence,

26

experience, is almost as far away from medieval Christianity as it is from Neoplatonism or Yoga.
Interpretations of the experience have not grown from the experience itself with the aid of such
scientific resources as may be available. They have been imported by borrowing without criticism
from ideas that are current in the surrounding culture.

The mystic states of the shaman and of some North American Indians are frankly techniques for
gaining a special powerthe power as it is conceived by some revivalist sects. There is noes-pecial
especial intellectual objectification accompanying the experience. The knowledge that is said to be
gained is not that of Being but of particular secrets and occult modes of operation. The aim is not to
gain knowledge of superior divine power, but to get advice, cures for the sick, prestige, etc. The
conception that mysticexpe-rience experience is a normal mode of religious experience by which we
may acquire knowledge of God and divine things is a nineteenth- century interpretation that has
gained vogue in direct ratio to the decline of older methods of religious apologetics.

There is no reason for denying the existence of experiences that are called mystical. On the contrary,
there is every reason to suppose that, in some degree of intensity, they occur sofre-quently
frequently that they may be regarded as normal manifestations that take place at certain rhythmic
points in the movement ofexperi-ence. experience. The assumption that denial of a particular
interpretation of their objective content proves that those who make the denial do not have the
experience in question, so that if they had it they would be equally persuaded of its objective source
in thepres-ence presence of God, has no foundation in fact. As with every empirical phenomenon,
the occurrence of the state called mystical is simply an occasion for inquiry into its mode of causation.
There is no more reason for converting the experience itself into animmedi-ate immediate
knowledge of its cause than in the case of an experience of lightning or any other natural occurrence.

My purpose, then, in this brief reference to mysticism is not to throw doubt upon the existence of
particular experiences called mystical. Nor is it to propound any theory to account for them. I have
referred to the matter merely as an illustration of thegen-eral general tendency to mark off two
distinct realms in one of whichsci-ence science has jurisdiction, while in the other, special modes
ofimme-diate immediate knowledge of religious objects have authority. This dualism

27

as it operates in contemporary interpretation of mysticexperi-ence experience in order to validate

certain beliefs is but a reinstatement of the old dualism between the natural and the supernatural, in
terms better adapted to the cultural conditions of the present time. Since it is the conception of the
supernatural that science calls in question, the circular nature of this type of reasoning is obvious.

Apologists for a religion often point to the shift that goes on in scientific ideas and materials as
evidence of the unreliability of science as a mode of knowledge. They often seem peculiarlyela-ted
elated by the great, almost revolutionary, change in fundamental physical conceptions that has taken
place in science during the present generation. Even if the alleged unreliability were as great as they
assume (or even greater), the question would remain: Have we any other recourse for knowledge?
But in fact they miss the point. Science is not constituted by any particular body of subject-matter. It
is constituted by a method, a method ofchang-ing changing beliefs by means of tested inquiry as
well as of arriving at them. It is its glory, not its condemnation, that its subject-matter develops as
the method is improved. There is no special subject- matter of belief that is sacrosanct. The
identification of science with a particular set of beliefs and ideas is itself a hold-over of ancient and
still current dogmatic habits of thought which are opposed to science in its actuality and which
science is undermining.

For scientific method is adverse not only to dogma but todoc-trine doctrine as well, provided we
take "doctrine" in its usual meaning a body of definite beliefs that need only to be taught and
learned as true. This negative attitude of science to doctrine does notin-dicate indicate indifference
to truth. It signifies supreme loyalty to the method by which truth is attained. The scientific-
religiouscon-flict conflict ultimately is a conflict between allegiance to this method and allegiance to
even an irreducible minimum of belief so fixed in advance that it can never be modified.

The method of intelligence is open and public. The doctrinal method is limited and private. This
limitation persists even when knowledge of the truth that is religious is said to be arrived at by a
special mode of experience, that termed "religious." For the latter is assumed to be a very special
kind of experience. To be sure it is asserted to be open to all who obey certain conditions.

28

Yet the mystic experience yields, as we have seen, various results in the way of belief to different
persons, depending upon thesur-rounding surrounding culture of those who undergo it. As a
method, it lacks the public character belonging to the method of intelligence. Moreover, when the
experience in question does not yieldcon-sciousness consciousness of the presence of God, in the
sense that is alleged to exist, the retort is always at hand that it is not a genuine religious experience.
For by definition, only that experience is religious which arrives at this particular result. The
argument is circular. The traditional position is that some hardness or corruption of heart prevents
one from having the experience. Liberalreli-gionists religionists are now more humane. But their
logic does not differ.

It is sometimes held that beliefs about religious matters are symbolic, like rites and ceremonies. This
view may be an advance upon that which holds to their literal objective validity. But as usually put
forward it suffers from an ambiguity. Of what are the beliefs symbols? Are they symbols of things
experienced in other modes than those set apart as religious, so that the things symbolized have an
independent standing? Or are theysym-bols symbols in the sense of standing for some
transcendental reality transcendental because not being the subject-matter ofexperi-ence
experience generally? Even the fundamentalist admits a certain quality and degree of symbolism in
the latter sense in objects of religious belief. For he holds that the objects of these beliefs are so
farbe-yond beyond finite human capacity that our beliefs must be couched in more or less
metaphorical terms. The conception that faith is the best available substitute for knowledge in our
present estate still attaches to the notion of the symbolic character of the materials of faith; unless
by ascribing to them a symbolic nature we mean that these materials stand for something that is
verifiable ingen-eral general and public experience.

Were we to adopt the latter point of view, it would be evident not only that the intellectual articles
of a creed must beunder-stood understood to be symbolic of moral and other ideal values, but that
the facts taken to be historic and used as concrete evidence of the intellectual articles are
themselves symbolic. These articles of a creed present events and persons that have been made over
by the idealizing imagination in the interest, at their best, of moral ideals. Historic personages in their
divine attributes aremateri-alizations materializations of the ends that enlist devotion and inspire
endeavor.

29

They are symbolic of the reality of ends moving us in many forms of experience. The ideal values that
are thus symbolized also mark human experience in science and art and the various modes of human
association: they mark almost everything in life that rises from the level of manipulation of
conditions as they exist. It is admitted that the objects of religion are ideal in contrast with our
present state. What would be lost if it were also admitted that they have authoritative claim upon
conduct just because they are ideal? The assumption that these objects of religion exist already in
some realm of Being seems to add nothing to their force, while it weakens their claim over us as
ideals, in so far as it bases that claim upon matters that are intellectually dubious. The question
narrows itself to this: Are the ideals that move us genuinely ideal or are they ideal only in contrast
with our present estate?

The import of the question extends far. It determines the meaning given to the word "God." On one
score, the word can mean only a particular Being. On the other score, it denotes the unity of all ideal
ends arousing us to desire and actions. Does the unification have a claim upon our attitude and
conduct because it is already, apart from us, in realized existence, or because of its own inherent
meaning and value? Suppose for the moment that the word "God" means the ideal ends that at a
given time and place one acknowledges as having authority over his volition and emotion, the values
to which one is supremely devoted, as far as these ends, through imagination, take on unity. If we
make this supposition, the issue will stand out clearly in contrast with the doctrine of religions that
"God" designates some kind of Being having prior and therefore non-ideal existence.

The word "non-ideal" is to be taken literally in regard to some religions that have historically existed,
to all of them as far as they are neglectful of moral qualities in their divine beings. It does not apply in
the same literal way to Judaism andChristian-ity. Christianity. For they have asserted that the
Supreme Being has moral and spiritual attributes. But it applies to them none the less in that these
moral and spiritual characters are thought of as properties of a particular existence and are thought
to be of religious value for us because of this embodiment in such an existence. Here, as far as I can
see, is the ultimate issue as to the difference between a religion and the religious as a function of
experience.

The idea that "God" represents a unification of ideal values

 30

that is essentially imaginative in origin when the imaginationsu-pervenes supervenes in conduct is

attended with verbal difficulties owing to our frequent use of the word "imagination" to denote
fantasy and doubtful reality. But the reality of ideal ends as ideals is vouched for by their undeniable
power in action. An ideal is not an illusion because imagination is the organ through which it is
apprehended. For all possibilities reach us through theimagina-tion. imagination. In a definite sense
the only meaning that can be assigned the term "imagination" is that things unrealized in fact come
home to us and have power to stir us. The unification effected through imagination is not fanciful, for
it is the reflex of the unification of practical and emotional attitudes. The unity signifies not a single
Being, but the unity of loyalty and effort evoked by the fact that many ends are one in the power of
their ideal, or imaginative, quality to stir and hold us.

We may well ask whether the power and significance in life of the traditional conceptions of God are
not due to the idealquali-ties qualities referred to by them, the hypostatization of them into an
existence being due to a conflux of tendencies in human nature that converts the object of desire
into an antecedent reality (as was mentioned in the previous chapter) with beliefs that have
prevailed in the cultures of the past. For in the older cultures the idea of the supernatural was
"natural," in the sense in which "natural" signifies something customary and familiar. It seems more
credible that religious persons have been supported and consoled by the reality with which ideal
values appeal to them than that they have been upborne by sheer matter of fact existence. That,
when once men are inured to the idea of the union of the ideal and the physical, the two should be
so bound together in emotion that it is difficult to institute a separation, agrees with all we know of
human psychology.

The benefits that will accrue, however, from making thesepa-ration separation are evident. The
dislocation frees the religious values of experience once for all from matters that are
continuallybecom-ing becoming more dubious. With that release there comes emancipation from
the necessity of resort to apologetics. The reality of ideal ends and values in their authority over us is
an undoubted fact. The validity of justice, affection, and that intellectualcorrespon-dence
correspondence of our ideas with realities that we call truth, is so assured in its hold upon humanity
that it is unnecessary for the religious

31

attitude to encumber itself with the apparatus of dogma anddoc-trine. doctrine. Any other
conception of the religious attitude, when it is adequately analyzed, means that those who hold it
care more for force than for ideal valuessince all that an Existence can add is force to establish, to
punish, and to reward. There are, indeed, some persons who frankly say that their own faith does
notre-quire require any guarantee that moral values are backed up by physical force, but who hold
that the masses are so backward that ideal values will not affect their conduct unless in the popular
belief these values have the sanction of a power that can enforce them and can execute justice upon
those who fail to comply.

There are some persons, deserving of more respect, who say: "We agree that the beginning must be
made with the primacy of the ideal. But why stop at this point? Why not search with the utmost
eagerness and vigor for all the evidence we can find, such as is supplied by history, by presence of
design in nature, which may lead on to the belief that the ideal is already extant in aPer-sonality
Personality having objective existence?"

One answer to the question is that we are involved by this search in all the problems of the existence
of evil that have haunted theology in the past and that the most ingenious apologetics have not
faced, much less met. If these apologists had not identified the existence of ideal goods with that of a
Person supposed to originate and support thema Being, moreover, to whomom-nipotent
omnipotent power is attributedthe problem of the occurrence of evil would be gratuitous. The
significance of ideal ends and meanings is, indeed, closely connected with the fact that there are in
life all sorts of things that are evil to us because we would have them otherwise. Were existing
conditions wholly good, the notion of possibilities to be realized would never emerge.

But the more basic answer is that while if the search iscon-ducted conducted upon a strictly
empirical basis there is no reason why it should not take place, as a matter of fact it is always
undertaken in the interest of the supernatural. Thus it diverts attention and energy from ideal values
and from the exploration of actualcon-ditions conditions by means of which they may be promoted.
History istes-timony testimony to this fact. Men have never fully used the powers they possess to
advance the good in life, because they have waited upon some power external to themselves and to
nature to do the work they are responsible for doing. Dependence upon anexter-nal

32

external power is the counterpart of surrender of human endeavor. Nor is emphasis on exercising
our own powers for good an egoistical or a sentimentally optimistic recourse. It is not the first, for it
does not isolate man, either individually orcollec-tively, collectively, from nature. It is not the second,
because it makes noas-sumption assumption beyond that of the need and responsibility for human
endeavor, and beyond the conviction that, if human desire and endeavor were enlisted in behalf of
natural ends, conditions would be bettered. It involves no expectation of a millennium of good.
Belief in the supernatural as a necessary power forapprehen-sion apprehension of the ideal and for
practical attachment to it has for its counterpart a pessimistic belief in the corruption and impotency
of natural means. That is axiomatic in Christian dogma. But this apparent pessimism has a way of
suddenly changing into anex-aggerated exaggerated optimism. For according to the terms of the
doctrine, if the faith in the supernatural is of the required order,regenera-tion regeneration at once
takes place. Goodness, in all essentials, is thereby established; if not, there is proof that the
established relation to the supernatural has been vitiated. This romantic optimism is one cause for
the excessive attention to individual salvationchar-acteristic characteristic of traditional Christianity.
Belief in a sudden andcom-plete complete transmutation through conversion and in the objective
efficacy of prayer, is too easy a way out of difficulties. It leaves matters in general just about as they
were before; that is,suffic-iently sufficiently bad so that there is additional support for the idea that
only supernatural aid can better them. The position of naturalin-telligence intelligence is that there
exists a mixture of good and evil, and that reconstruction in the direction of the good which is
indicated by ideal ends, must take place, if at all, through continuedcooper-ative cooperative effort.
There is at least enough impulse toward justice,kind-liness, kindliness, and order so that if it were
mobilized for action, not expecting abrupt and complete transformation to occur, thedis-order,
disorder, cruelty, and oppression that exist would be reduced.

The discussion has arrived at a point where a morefundamen-tal fundamental objection to the
position I am taking needs consideration. The misunderstanding upon which this objection rests
should be pointed out. The view I have advanced is sometimes treated as if the identification of the
divine with ideal ends left the ideal wholly without roots in existence and without support from
existence. The objection implies that my view commits one to

33

such a separation of the ideal and the existent that the ideal has no chance to find lodgment even as
a seed that might grow and bear fruit. On the contrary, what I have been criticizing is the
identification of the ideal with a particular Being, especially when that identification makes necessary
the conclusion that this Being is outside of nature, and what I have tried to show is that the ideal
itself has its roots in natural conditions; it emerges when the imagination idealizes existence by laying
hold of the possibilities offered to thought and action. There are values, goods, actually realized upon
a natural basisthe goods ofhu-man human association, of art and knowledge. The
idealizingimagina-tion imagination seizes upon the most precious things found in theclimac-teric
climacteric moments of experience and projects them. We need no external criterion and guarantee
for their goodness. They are had, they exist as good, and out of them we frame our ideal ends.

Moreover, the ends that result from our projection ofexperi-enced experienced goods into objects
of thought, desire and effort exist, only they exist as ends. Ends, purposes, exercise determining
power in human conduct. The aims of philanthropists, of Florence Nightingale, of Howard, of
Wilberforce, of Peabody, have not been idle dreams. They have modified institutions. Aims, ideals,
do not exist simply in "mind"; they exist in character, inperson-ality personality and action. One
might call the roll of artists, intellectual inquirers, parents, friends, citizens who are neighbors, to
show that purposes exist in an operative way. What I have beenobject-ing objecting to, I repeat, is
not the idea that ideals are linked with existence and that they themselves exist, through human
embodiment, as forces, but the idea that their authority and value depend upon some prior
complete embodimentas if the efforts of humanbe-ings beings in behalf of justice, or knowledge
or beauty, depended for their effectiveness and validity upon assurance that there already existed in
some supernal region a place where criminals arehu-manely humanely treated, where there is no
serfdom or slavery, where all facts and truths are already discovered and possessed, and all beauty is
eternally displayed in actualized form.

The aims and ideals that move us are generated throughimag-ination. imagination. But they are not
made out of imaginary stuff. They are made out of the hard stuff of the world of physical and
socialex-perience. experience. The locomotive did not exist before Stevenson, nor the telegraph
before the time of Morse. But the conditions for their

34

existence were there in physical material and energies and inhu-man human capacity. Imagination
seized hold upon the idea of are-arrangement rearrangement of existing things that would evolve
new objects. The same thing is true of a painter, a musician, a poet, aphi-lanthropist, philanthropist,
a moral prophet. The new vision does not arise out of nothing, but emerges through seeing, in terms
of possibilities, that is, of imagination, old things in new relations serving a new end which the new
end aids in creating.

Moreover the process of creation is experimental andcontinu-ous. continuous. The artist, scientific
man, or good citizen, depends upon what others have done before him and are doing around him.
The sense of new values that become ends to be realized arises first in dim and uncertain form. As
the values are dwelt upon and carried forward in action they grow in definiteness andcoher-ence.
coherence. Interaction between aim and existent conditions improves and tests the ideal; and
conditions are at the same time modified. Ideals change as they are applied in existent conditions.
Thepro-cess process endures and advances with the life of humanity. What one person and one
group accomplish becomes the standing ground and starting point of those who succeed them.
When the vital factors in this natural process are generally acknowledged inemo-tion, emotion,
thought and action, the process will be both accelerated and purified through elimination of that
irrelevant element that culminates in the idea of the supernatural. When the vital factors attain the
religious force that has been drafted into supernatural religions, the resulting reinforcement will be
incalculable.
These considerations may be applied to the idea of God, or, to avoid misleading conceptions, to the
idea of the divine. This idea is, as I have said, one of ideal possibilities unified throughimag-inative
imaginative realization and projection. But this idea of God, or of the divine, is also connected with all
the natural forces andcondi-tions conditionsincluding man and human associationthat promote
the growth of the ideal and that further its realization. We are in the presence neither of ideals
completely embodied in existence nor yet of ideals that are mere rootless ideals, fantasies, utopias.
For there are forces in nature and society that generate andsup-port support the ideals. They are
further unified by the action that gives them coherence and solidity. It is this active relation between
ideal and actual to which I would give the name "God." I would not insist that the name must be
given. There are those who hold

35

that the associations of the term with the supernatural are sonu-merous numerous and close that
any use of the word "God" is sure to give rise to misconception and be taken as a concession to
traditional ideas.

They may be correct in this view. But the facts to which I have referred are there, and they need to
be brought out with allpos-sible possible clearness and force. There exist concretely
andexperiment-ally experimentally goodsthe values of art in all its forms, of knowledge, of effort
and of rest after striving, of education and fellowship, of friendship and love, of growth in mind and
body. These goods are there and yet they are relatively embryonic. Many persons are shut out from
generous participation in them; there are forces at work that threaten and sap existent goods as well
as prevent their expansion. A clear and intense conception of a union of ideal ends with actual
conditions is capable of arousing steady emotion. It may be fed by every experience, no matter what
its material.

In a distracted age, the need for such an idea is urgent. It can unify interests and energies now
dispersed; it can direct action and generate the heat of emotion and the light of intelligence.
Whether one gives the name "God" to this union, operative in thought and action, is a matter for
individual decision. But the function of such a working union of the ideal and actual seems to me to
be identical with the force that has in fact been attached to the conception of God in all the religions
that have a spiritual content; and a clear idea of that function seems to me urgently needed at the
present time.

The sense of this union may, with some persons, be furthered by mystical experiences, using the
term "mystical" in itsbroad-est broadest sense. That result depends largely upon temperament. But
there is a marked difference between the union associated with mysticism and the union which I had
in mind. There is nothing mystical about the latter; it is natural and moral. Nor is there anything
mystical about the perception or consciousness of such union. Imagination of ideal ends pertinent to
actual conditions represents the fruition of a disciplined mind. There is, indeed, even danger that
resort to mystical experiences will be an escape, and that its result will be the passive feeling that the
union ofac-tual actual and ideal is already accomplished. But in fact this union is active and practical;
it is a uniting, not something given.

36

One reason why personally I think it fitting to use the word "God" to denote that uniting of the ideal
and actual which has been spoken of, lies in the fact that aggressive atheism seems to me to have
something in common with traditionalsupernatu-ralism. supernaturalism. I do not mean merely that
the former is mainly sonega-tive negative that it fails to give positive direction to thought, though
that fact is pertinent. What I have in mind especially is the exclusive preoccupation of both militant
atheism and supernaturalism with man in isolation. For in spite of supernaturalism's reference to
something beyond nature, it conceives of this earth as the moral centre of the universe and of man
as the apex of the whole scheme of things. It regards the drama of sin and redemptionen-acted
enacted within the isolated and lonely soul of man as the one thing of ultimate importance. Apart
from man, nature is held eitherac-cursed accursed or negligible. Militant atheism is also affected by
lack of natural piety. The ties binding man to nature that poets haveal-ways always celebrated are
passed over lightly. The attitude taken is often that of man living in an indifferent and hostile world
and issuing blasts of defiance. A religious attitude, however, needs the sense of a connection of man,
in the way of both dependence andsup-port, support, with the enveloping world that the
imagination feels is a universe. Use of the words "God" or "divine" to convey the union of actual with
ideal may protect man from a sense ofisola-tion isolation and from consequent despair or defiance.

In any case, whatever the name, the meaning is selective. For it involves no miscellaneous worship of
everything in general. Itse-lects selects those factors in existence that generate and support our idea
of good as an end to be striven for. It excludes a multitude of forces that at any given time are
irrelevant to this function. Nature produces whatever gives reinforcement and direction but also
what occasions discord and confusion. The "divine" is thus a term of human choice and aspiration. A
humanistic religion, if it excludes our relation to nature, is pale and thin, as it ispre-sumptuous,
presumptuous, when it takes humanity as an object of worship. Matthew Arnold's conception of a
"power not ourselves" is too narrow in its reference to operative and sustaining conditions. While it
is selective, it is too narrow in its basis of selection righteousness. The conception thus needs to be
widened in two ways. The powers that generate and support the good asexperi-enced experienced
and as ideal, work within as well as without. There seems
 37

to be a reminiscence of an external Jehovah in Arnold's statement. And the powers work to enforce
other values and ideals than righteousness. Arnold's sense of an opposition between Hellenism and
Hebraism resulted in exclusion of beauty, truth, andfriend-ship friendship from the list of the
consequences toward which powers work within and without.

In the relation between nature and human ends and endeavors, recent science has broken down the
older dualism. It has been engaged in this task for three centuries. But as long as thecon-ceptions
conceptions of science were strictly mechanical (mechanical in the sense of assuming separate things
acting upon one another purely externally by push and pull), religious apologists had a standing
ground in pointing out the differences between man and physical nature. The differences could be
used for arguing that something supernatural had intervened in the case of man. The recentac-claim,
acclaim, however, by apologists for religion of the surrender bysci-ence science of the classic type of
mechanicalism I use this term because science has not abandoned its beliefs in working mechanisms
in giving up the idea that they are of the nature of a strictlyme-chanical mechanical contact of
discrete things. 1 seems ill-advised from their own point of view. For the change in the modern
scientific view of nature simply brings man and nature nearer together. We are no longer compelled
to choose between explaining away what is distinctive in man through reducing him to another form
of a mechanical model and the doctrine that something literally supernatural marks him off from
nature. The less mechanicalin its older sensephysical nature is found to be, the closer is man to
nature.

In his fascinating book, The Dawn of Conscience, James Henry Breasted refers to Haeckel as saying
that the question he would most wish to have answered is this: Is the universe friendly to man? The
question is an ambiguous one. Friendly to man in what respect? With respect to ease and comfort, to
material success, to egoistic ambitions? Or to his aspiration to inquire and discover, to invent and
create, to build a more secure order for human existence? In whatever form the question be put, the
answercan-not cannot in all honesty be an unqualified and absolute one. Mr. Breasted's answer, as
a historian, is that nature has been friendly to the emergence and development of conscience and
character. Those who will have all or nothing cannot be satisfied with this

38

answer. Emergence and growth are not enough for them. They want something more than growth
accompanied by toil and pain. They want final achievement. Others who are lessabso-lutist
absolutist may be content to think that, morally speaking, growth is a higher value and ideal than is
sheer attainment. They willre-member remember also that growth has not been confined to
conscience and character; that it extends also to discovery, learning and knowledge, to creation in
the arts, to furtherance of ties that hold men together in mutual aid and affection. These persons at
least will be satisfied with an intellectual view of the religious function that is based on continuing
choice directed toward ideal ends.

For, I would remind readers in conclusion, it is the intellectual side of the religious attitude that I
have been considering. I have suggested that the religious element in life has been hampered by
conceptions of the supernatural that were imbedded in thosecul-tures cultures wherein man had
little control over outer nature and little in the way of sure method of inquiry and test. The crisis
today as to the intellectual content of religious belief has been caused by the change in the
intellectual climate due to the increase of our knowledge and our means of understanding. I have
tried to show that this change is not fatal to the religious values in our common experience, however
adverse its impact may be upon historicreli-gions. religions. Rather, provided that the methods and
results ofintelli-gence intelligence at work are frankly adopted, the change is liberating.

It clarifies our ideals, rendering them less subject to illusion and fantasy. It relieves us of the incubus
of thinking of them as fixed, as without power of growth. It discloses that they develop in coherence
and pertinency with increase of natural intelligence. The change gives aspiration for natural
knowledge a definitelyre-ligious religious character, since growth in understanding of nature is seen
to be organically related to the formation of ideal ends. The same change enables man to select
those elements in naturalcondi-tions conditions that may be organized to support and extend the
sway of ideals. All purpose is selective, and all intelligent action includes deliberate choice. In the
degree in which we cease to depend upon belief in the supernatural, selection is enlightened and
choice can be made in behalf of ideals whose inherent relations to conditions and consequences are
understood. Were thenatu-ralistic naturalistic foundations and bearings of religion grasped, thereli-
gious

39

religious element in life would emerge from the throes of the crisis in religion. Religion would then be
found to have its natural place in every aspect of human experience that is concerned with estimate
of possibilities, with emotional stir by possibilities as yetun-realized, unrealized, and with all action
in behalf of their realization. All that is significant in human experience falls within this frame.

40
3. The Human Abode of the Religious Function In discussing the intellectual content of religion before
considering religion in its social connections, I did not follow the usual temporal order. Upon the
whole, collective modes ofprac-tice practice either come first or are of greater importance. The core
of religions has generally been found in rites and ceremonies.Leg-ends Legends and myths grow up
in part as decorative dressings, inre-sponse response to the irrepressible human tendency toward
story-telling, and in part as attempts to explain ritual practices. Then ascul-ture culture advances,
stories are consolidated, and theogonies andcos-mogonies cosmogonies are formedas with the
Babylonians, Egyptians, Hebrews and Greeks. In the case of the Greeks, the stories of creation and
accounts of the constitution of the world were mainly poetic and literary, and philosophies ultimately
developed from them. In most cases, legends along with rites and ceremonies came under the
guardianship of a special body, the priesthood, and were subject to the special arts which it
possessed. A special group was set aside as the responsible owners, protectors, and promulgators of
the corpus of beliefs.

But the formation of a special social group having a peculiar relation to both the practices and the
beliefs of religion is but part of the story. In the widest perspective, it is the less important part. The
more significant point as regards the social import of religion is that the priesthoods were official
representatives of some community, tribe, city-state or empire. Whether there was a priesthood or
not, individuals who were members of acommu-nity community were born into a religious
community as they were intoso-cial social and political organization. Each social group had its
owndi-vine divine beings who were its founders and protectors. Its rites of sacrifice, purification,
and communion were manifestations of organized civic life. The temple was a public institution, the
focus of the worship of the community; the influence of itsprac-tices

41

practices extended to all the customs of the community, domestic, economic, and political. Even
wars between groups were usually conflicts of their respective deities.

An individual did not join a church. He was born and reared in a community whose social unity,
organization and traditions were symbolized and celebrated in the rites, cults and beliefs of a
collective religion. Education was the induction of the young into community activities that were
interwoven at every point with customs, legends and ceremonies intimately connected with and
sanctioned by a religion. There are a few persons, especially those brought up in Jewish communities
in Russia, who can understand without the use of imagination what a religion means socially when it
permeates all the customs and activities of group life. To most of us in the United States such a
situation is only a remote historic episode.
The change that has taken place in conditions once universal and now infrequent is in my opinion the
greatest change that has occurred in religion in all history. The intellectual conflict ofsci-entific
scientific and theological beliefs has attracted much more attention. It is still near the focus of
attention. But the change in the social centre of gravity of religion has gone on so steadily and is now
so generally accomplished that it has faded from the thought of most persons, save perhaps the
historians, and even they arees-pecially especially aware of it only in its political aspect. For the
conflict between state and church still continues in some countries.

There are even now persons who are born into a particular church, that of their parents, and who
take membership in ital-most almost as a matter of course; indeed, the fact of such membership
may be an important, even a determining, factor in anindivid-ual's individual's whole career. But the
thing new in history, the thing once unheard of, is that the organization in question is a specialin-
stitution institution within a secular community. Even where there arees-tablished established
churches, they are constituted by the state and may be unmade by the state. Not only the national
state but other forms of organization among groups have grown in power andinflu-ence influence at
the expense of organizations built upon and about areli-gion. religion. The correlate of this fact is
that membership in associations of the latter type is more and more a matter of the voluntary choice
of individuals, who may tend to accept responsibilitiesim-posed imposed by the church but who
accept them of their own volition.

42

If they do accept them, the organization they join is, in manyna-tions, nations, chartered under a
general corporation law of the political and secular entity.

The shift in what I have called the social centre of gravityac-companies accompanies the enormous
expansion of associations formed for educational, political, economic, philanthropic and scientific
purposes, which has occurred independently of any religion. These social modes have grown so much
that they exercise the greater hold upon the thought and interest of most persons, even of those
holding membership in churches. This positiveexten-sion extension of interests which, from the
standpoint of a religion, are non-religious, is so great that in comparison with it the direct effect of
science upon the creeds of religion seems to me ofsec-ondary secondary importance.

I say, the direct effect; for the indirect effect of science in stimulating the growth of competing
organizations is enormous. Changes that are purely intellectual affect at most but a small number of
specialists. They are secondary to consequences brought about through impact upon the conditions
under which human beings associate with one another. Invention and technology, in alliance with
industry and commerce, have, needless to say, profoundly affected these underlying conditions of
association. Every political and social problem of the present day reflects this indirect influence, from
unemployment to banking, frommu-nicipal municipal administration to the great migration of
peoples made possible by new modes of transportation, from birth control to foreign commerce and
war. The social changes that have come about through application of the new knowledge affect
everyone, whether he is aware or not of the source of the forces that play upon him. The effect is the
deeper, indeed, because so largelyun-conscious. unconscious. For, to repeat what I have said, the
conditions under which people meet and act together have been modified.

The fundamentalist in religion is one whose beliefs inintellec-tual intellectual content have hardly
been touched by scientificdevelop-ments. developments. His notions about heaven and earth and
man, as far as their bearing on religion is concerned, are hardly more affected by the work of
Copernicus, Newton, and Darwin than they are by that of Einstein. But his actual life, in what he does
day by day and in the contacts that are set up, has been radically changed by political and economic
changes that have followed

43

from applications of science. As far as strictly intellectual changes are concerned, creeds display great
power of accommodation; their articles undergo insensible change of perspective; emphases are
altered, and new meanings creep in. The Catholic Church, particularly, has shown leniency in dealing
with intellectual deviations as long as they do not touch discipline, rites, and sacraments.

Among the laity only a small number, the more highlyedu-cated educated section, is directly
affected by changes in scientific beliefs. Certain ideas recede more or less into the background but
are not seriously challenged; nominally they are accepted. Probably most educated people thought
the conception of biologicalevo-lution evolution had been accepted as a commonplace until
legislation in Tennessee and the Scopes trial brought about an acute crisis that revealed how far that
was from being the case. Within aneccle-siastic ecclesiastic organization, on the other hand, the
class of professionals does not sense the change in perspective and emphasis of values in the general
mind until some acute situation reveals it. Then they vigorously deny the validity of the new interests
that have arisen. But since they are working against interests rather than merely against ideas, their
desperate efforts are not convincing except for those already convinced.

Changes in practice that affect collective life go deep andex-tend extend far. They have been
operating ever since the time we call the Middle Ages. The Renaissance was essentially a new birth of
secularism. The development of the idea of "natural religion," characteristic of the eighteenth
century, was a protest against control by ecclesiastic bodiesa movement foreshadowed in this
respect by the growth of "independent" religious societies in the preceding century. But natural
religion no more denied the intellectual validity of supernatural ideas than did the growth of
independent congregations. It attempted rather to justify theism and immortality on the basis of the
natural reason of theindi-vidual. individual. The transcendentalism of the nineteenth century was a
further move in the same general direction, a movement in which "reason" took on a more romantic,
more colorful, and morecol-lective collective form. It asserted the diffusion of the supernatural
through secular life.

These movements and others not mentioned are theintellec-tual intellectual reflex of the greatest
revolution that has taken place inreli-gions

44

religions during the thousands of years that man has been upon earth. For, as I have said, this change
has to do with the social place and function of religion. Even the hold of the supernatural upon the
general mind has become more and more disassociated from the power of ecclesiastic
organizationthat is, of anypar-ticular particular form of communal organization. Thus the very idea
that was central in religions has more and more oozed away, so to speak, from the guardianship and
care of any particular social institution. Even more important is the fact that a steadyen-croachment
encroachment upon ecclesiastic institutions of forms of association once regarded as secular has
altered the way in which men spend their time in work, recreation, citizenship, and political action.
The essential point is not just that secular organizations andac-tions actions are legally or externally
severed from the control of the church, but that interests and values unrelated to the offices of any
church now so largely sway the desires and aims of even believers.

The individual believer may indeed carry the disposition and motivation he has acquired through
affiliation with a religious organization into his political action, into his connection with schools, even
into his business and amusements. But therere-main remain two facts that constitute a revolution.
In the first place, conditions are such that this action is a matter of personal choice and resolution on
the part of individuals, not of the very nature of social organization. In the second place, the very fact
that an individual imports or carries his personal attitude into affairs that are inherently secular, that
are outside the scope of religion, constitutes an enormous change, in spite of the belief that secular
matters should be permeated by the spirit of religion. Even if it be asserted, as it is by some
religionists, that all the new movements and interests of any value grew up under the auspices of a
church and received their impetus from the same source, it must bead-mitted admitted that once
the vessels have been launched, they are sailing on strange seas to far lands.

Here, it seems to me, is the issue to be faced. Here is the place where the distinction that I have
drawn between a religion and the religious function is peculiarly applicable. It is of the nature of a
religion based on the supernatural to draw a line between the religious and the secular and profane,
even when it asserts the rightful authority of the Church and its religion to dominate

45

these other interests. The conception that "religious" signifies a certain attitude and outlook,
independent of the supernatural, necessitates no such division. It does not shut religious values up
within a particular compartment, nor assume that a particular form of association bears a unique
relation to it. Upon the social side the future of the religious function seems preeminently bound up
with its emancipation from religions and a particularreli-gion. religion. Many persons feel perplexed
because of the multiplicity of churches and the conflict of their claims. But the fundamental difficulty
goes deeper.

In what has been said I have not ignored the interpretation put, by representatives of religious
organizations, upon the historic change that has occurred. The oldest organization, the Roman
Catholic church, judges the secularization of life, the growingin-dependence independence of social
interests and values from control by the church, as but one evidence the more of the apostasy of
thenatu-ral natural man from God: the corruption inherent in the will ofman-kind mankind has
resulted in defiance of the authority that God hasdele-gated delegated to his designated
representatives on earth. This church points to the fact that secularization has proceeded pari passu
with the extension of Protestantism as evidence of the wilful heresy of the latter in its appeal to
private conscience and choice. The remedy is simple. Submission to the will of God, ascontinu-ously
continuously expressed through the organization that is his established vicegerent on earth, is the
sole means by which social relations and values can again become coextensive with religion.

Protestant churches, on the contrary, have emphasized the fact that the relation of man to God is
primarily an individual matter, a matter of personal choice and responsibility. From this point of view,
one aspect of the change outlined marks an advance that is religious as well as moral. For according
to it, the beliefs and rites that tend to make relation of man to God a collective and institutional affair
erect barriers between the human soul and the divine spirit. Communion with God must be initiated
by thein-dividual's individual's heart and will through direct divine assistance. Hence the change that
has occurred in the social status of organized religion is nothing to deplore. What has been lost was
at best specious and external. What has been gained is that religion has been placed upon its only
real and solid foundation: directrela-tionship relationship of conscience and will to God. Although
there is much

46
that is non-Christian and anti-Christian in existing economic and political institutions, it is better that
change beaccom-plished accomplished by the sum total of efforts of men and women who are
imbued with personal faith, than that they be effected by any wholesale institutional effort that
subordinates the individual to an external and ultimately a worldly authority.

Were the question involved in these two opposed views taken up in detail, there are some specific
considerations that might be urged. It might be urged that the progressive secularization of the
interests of life has not been attended by the increasingdegenera-tion degeneration that the
argument of the first group implies. There are many who, as historical students, independent of
affiliation with any religion, would regard reversal of the process of secularization and return to
conditions in which the Church was the finalau-thority authority as a menace to things held most
precious. With reference to the position of Protestantism, it may be urged that in fact such social
advances as have taken place are not the product ofvolun-tary voluntary religious associations; that,
on the contrary, the forces that have worked to humanize human relations, that have resulted in
intellectual and aesthetic development, have come frominflu-ences influences that are independent
of the churches. A case could be made out for the position that the churches have lagged behind in
most important social movements and that they have turned their chief attention in social affairs to
moral symptoms, to vices and abuses, like drunkenness, sale of intoxicants, divorce, rather than to
the causes of war and of the long list of economic and political injustices and oppressions. Protest
against the latter has been mainly left to secular movements.

In earlier times, what we now call the supernatural hardly meant anything more definite than the
extraordinary, that which was striking and emotionally impressive because of its out-of-the- way
character. Probably even today the commonest conception of the natural is that which is usual,
customary and familiar. When there is no insight into the cause of unusual events, belief in the
supernatural is itself "natural"in this sense of natural. Supernaturalism was, therefore, a genuinely
social religion as long as men's minds were attuned to the supernatural. It gave an "explanation" of
extraordinary occurrences while it provided techniques for utilizing supernatural forces to secure
advantages

47

and to protect the members of the community against them when they were adverse.

The growth of natural science brought extraordinary things into line with events for which there is a
"natural" explanation. At the same time, the development of positive social interests crowded
heavenand its opposite, hellinto the background. The function and offices of churches became
more and morespe-cialized; specialized; concerns and values that had been regarded, in anear-lier
earlier contrast, as profane and secular grew in bulk and inimpor-tance. importance. At the same
time, the notion that basic and ultimate spiritual and ideal values are associated with the
supernatural has persisted as a kind of vague background and aura. A kind of polite deference to the
notion remains along with a concrete transfer of interest. The general mind is thus left in a confused
and divided state. The movement that has been going on for the last few centuries will continue to
breed doubleness of mind until religious meanings and values are definitely integrated intonor-mal
normal social relations.

The issue may be more definitely stated. The extreme position on one side is that apart from relation
to the supernatural, man is morally on a level with the brutes. The other position is that all significant
ends and all securities for stability and peace have grown up in the matrix of human relations, and
that the values given a supernatural locus are in fact products of an idealizing imagination that has
laid hold of natural goods. There ensues a second contrast. On the one hand, it is held that relation
to the supernatural is the only finally dependable source of motive power; that directly and indirectly
it has animated every serious effort for the guidance and rectification of man's life on earth. The
other position is that goods actually experienced in thecon-crete concrete relations of family,
neighborhood, citizenship, pursuit of art and science, are what men actually depend upon for
guidance and support, and that their reference to a supernatural and other-worldly locus has
obscured their real nature and hasweak-ened weakened their force.

The contrasts outlined define the religious problem of the present and the future. What would be
the consequences upon the values of human association if intrinsic and immanentsatis-factions
satisfactions and opportunities were clearly held to and cultivated

48

with the ardor and the devotion that have at times markedhis-toric historic religions? The
contention of an increasing number ofper-sons persons is that depreciation of natural social values
has resulted, both in principle and in actual fact, from reference of their origin and significance to
supernatural sources. Natural relations, of husband and wife, of parent and child, friend and
friend,neigh-bor neighbor and neighbor, of fellow workers in industry, science, and art, are
neglected, passed over, not developed for all that is in them. They are, moreover, not merely
depreciated. They have beenre-garded regarded as dangerous rivals of higher values; as
offeringtempta-tions temptations to be resisted; as usurpations by flesh of the authority of the spirit;
as revolts of the human against the divine.

The doctrine of original sin and total depravity, of thecorrup-tion corruption of nature, external and
internal, is not especially current in liberal religious circles at present. Rather, there prevails the idea
that there are two separate systems of valuesan idea similar to that referred to in the previous
chapter about a revelation of two kinds of truth. The values found in natural and supernaturalrela-
tionships relationships are now, in liberal circles, said to be complementary, just as the truths of
revelation and of science are the two sides, mutually sustaining, of the same ultimate truth.

I cannot but think that this position represents a great advance upon the traditional one. While it is
open logically to theobjec-tions objections that hold against the idea of the dual revelation of truth,
practically it indicates a development of a humane point of view. But if it be once admitted that
human relations are charged with values that are religious in function, why not rest the case upon
what is verifiable and concentrate thought and energy upon its full realization?

History seems to exhibit three stages of growth. In the first stage, human relationships were thought
to be so infected with the evils of corrupt human nature as to require redemption from external and
supernatural sources. In the next stage, what issig-nificant significant in these relations is found to
be akin to values esteemed distinctively religious. This is the point now reached by liberal theologians.
The third stage would realize that in fact the values prized in those religions that have ideal elements
are idealizations of things characteristic of natural association, which have then been projected into a
supernatural realm for safe-keeping and sanction. Note the role of such terms as Father, Son, Bride,

49

Fellowship and Communion in the vocabulary of Christianity, and note also the tendency, even if a
somewhat inchoate one, of terms that express the more intimate phases of association todis-place
displace those of legal, political origin: King, Judge, and Lord of Hosts.

Unless there is a movement into what I have called the third stage, fundamental dualism and a
division in life continue. The idea of a double and parallel manifestation of the divine, in which the
latter has superior status and authority, brings about a condition of unstable equilibrium. It operates
to distract energy, through dividing the objects to which it is directed. It alsoim-peratively
imperatively raises the question as to why having gone far inrecog-nition recognition of religious
values in normal community life, we should not go further. The values of natural human intercourse
andmu-tual mutual dependence are open and public, capable of verification by the methods
through which all natural facts are established. By means of the same experimental method, they are
capable ofex-pansion. expansion. Why not concentrate upon nurturing and extending them? Unless
we take this step, the idea of two realms of spiritual values is only a softened version of the old
dualism between the secular and the spiritual, the profane and the religious.
The condition of unstable equilibrium is indeed so evident to the thoughtful mind that there are
attempts just now to revert to the earlier stage of belief. It is not difficult to make a severe
indictment of existing social relations. It is enough to point to the war, jealousy, and fear that
dominate the relations of national states to one another; to the growing demoralization of the older
ties of domestic life; to the staggering evidence of corruption and futility in politics, and to the
egoism, brutality, and oppression that characterize economic activities. By piling up material of this
sort, one may, if one chooses, arrive at the triumphantcon-clusion conclusion that social relations
are so debased that the only recourse is to supernatural aid. The general disorder of the Great War
and succeeding decades has led to a revival of the theology ofcorrup-tion, corruption, sin, and need
for supernatural redemption.

The conclusion does not follow, however, from the data. Itig-nores, ignores, in the first place, that
all the positive values which are prized, and in aid of which supernatural power is appealed to, have,
after all, emerged from the very scene of humanassocia-tions associations of which it is possible to
paint so black a picture.Some-thing

50

Something in the facts has been left out of the picture. I shall not bring forward again at this place
what was earlier said as to the effect upon actual conditions of diversion of the thought and action of
those who are peculiarly sensitive to ideal considerations into supernatural channels. I shall raise a
more directly practical issue. Society is convicted of being "immoral" by evoking all the evils of
institutions as they now exist, and the unexpressedprem-ise premise is that the institutions as they
exist are normal expressions of social relations in their own nature.

Were this premise stated, the enormous gap between it and the conclusion set forth would be
apparent. The problem of therela-tion relation between social relations and institutions that are
dominant at a particular time is the most intricate problem presented to social inquiry. The idea that
the latter are a direct reflex of the former ignores the multiplicity of factors that historically have
entered into the shaping of institutions. Historically speaking, many of these factors are accidental
with respect to theinstitu-tional institutional form that has been given to social relations. One of my
favorite quotations is a statement of Clarence Ayres that "ourin-dustrial industrial revolution began,
as some historians say, with half a dozen technical improvements in the textile industry; and it took
us a century to realize that anything of moment had happened to us, beyond the obvious
improvement of spinning and weaving." This statement must serve in lieu of long argument to
suggest what I mean by the "accidental" relation of institutionaldevel-opments developments to the
primary facts of human association. The relation is accidental because institutional consequences
that havere-sulted resulted were not foreseen or intended. To say this, is to say that social
intelligence in the sense in which there is intelligence about physical relations is in so far nonexistent.
Here is the negative fact that renders argument for theneces-sity necessity of supernatural
intervention to effect significant betterment only just another instance of the old, old inference to
thesupernat-ural supernatural from the basis of ignorance. We lack, for example, knowledge of the
relation of life to inanimate matter. Therefore supernatural intervention is assumed to have effected
the transition from brute to man. We do not know the relation of the organismthe brain and
nervous systemto the occurrence of thought. Therefore, it is argued, there is a supernatural link.
We do not know therela-tion relation of causes to results in social matters, and consequently we

51

lack means of control. Therefore, it is inferred, we must resort to supernatural control. Of course, I
make no claim to knowing how far intelligence may and will develop in respect to socialre-lations.
relations. But one thing I think I do know. The neededunderstand-ing understanding will not develop
unless we strive for it. The assumption that only supernatural agencies can give control is a sure
method of retarding this effort. It is as sure to be a hindering force now with respect to social
intelligence, as the similar appeal was earlier an obstruction in the development of physical
knowledge.

Even immediately, without awaiting the development of greater intelligence in relation to social
affairs, a great difference would be made by use of natural means and methods. It is even now
possible to examine complex social phenomena sufficiently to put the finger on things that are wrong.
It is possible to trace to some extent these evils to their causes, and to causes that are something
very different from abstract moral forces. It is possible to work out and work upon remedies for
some of the sore spots. The outcome will not be a gospel of salvation but it will be in line with that
pursued, for example, in matters of disease and health. The method if used would not only
accomplish somethingto-ward toward social health but it would accomplish a greater thing; it would
forward the development of social intelligence so that it could act with greater hardihood and on a
larger scale.

Vested interests, interests vested with power, are powerfully on the side of the status quo, and
therefore they are especially powerful in hindering the growth and application of the method of
natural intelligence. Just because these interests are sopower-ful, powerful, it is the more necessary
to fight for recognition of the method of intelligence in action. But one of the greatest obstacles
incon-ducting conducting this combat is the tendency to dispose of social evils in terms of general
moral causes. The sinfulness of man, thecorrup-tion corruption of his heart, his self-love and love of
power, when referred to as causes are precisely of the same nature as was the appeal to abstract
powers (which in fact only reduplicated under a general name a multitude of particular effects) that
once prevailed in physical "science," and that operated as a chief obstacle to the generation and
growth of the latter. Demons were once appealed to in order to explain bodily disease and no such
thing as a strictly natural death was supposed to happen. The importation of general moral causes to
explain present social phenomena is

52

on the same intellectual level. Reinforced by the prestige oftradi-tional traditional religions, and
backed by the emotional force of beliefs in the supernatural, it stifles the growth of that social
intelligence by means of which direction of social change could be taken out of the region of accident,
as accident has been defined. Accident in this broad sense and the idea of the supernatural are
twins.Inter-est Interest in the supernatural therefore reinforces other vested interests to prolong
the social reign of accident.

There is a strong reaction in some religious circles today against the idea of mere individual salvation
of individual souls. There is also a reaction in politics and economics against the idea of laissez faire.
Both of these movements reflect a commonten-dency. tendency. Both of them are signs of the
growing awareness of the emptiness of individuality in isolation. But the fundamental root of the
laissez faire idea is denial (more often implicit thanex-press) express) of the possibility of radical
intervention of intelligence in the conduct of human life. Now appeal for supernaturalinter-vention
intervention in improvement of social matters is also the expression of a deep-seated laissez-faireism;
it is the acknowledgment of the desperate situation into which we are driven by the idea of the
irrelevance and futility of human intervention in social events and interests. Those contemporary
theologians who areinter-ested interested in social change and who at the same time
depreciatehu-man human intelligence and effort in behalf of the supernatural, are riding two horses
that are going in opposite directions. The old- fashioned ideas of doing something to make the will of
God prevail in the world, and of assuming the responsibility of doing the job ourselves, have more to
be said for them, logically and practically.

The emphasis that has been put upon intelligence as a method should not mislead anyone.
Intelligence, as distinct from the older conception of reason, is inherently involved in action.
Moreover, there is no opposition between it and emotion. There is such a thing as passionate
intelligence, as ardor in behalf of light shining into the murky places of social existence, and as zeal
for its refreshing and purifying effect. The whole story of man shows that there are no objects that
may not deeply stiren-grossing engrossing emotion. One of the few experiments in the attachment
of emotion to ends that mankind has not tried is that of devotion,

53
so intense as to be religious, to intelligence as a force in social action.

But this is only part of the scene. No matter how much evidence may be piled up against social
institutions as they exist, affection and passionate desire for justice and security are realities in
human nature. So are the emotions that arise from living incon-ditions conditions of inequity,
oppression, and insecurity. Combination of the two kinds of emotion has more than once produced
those changes that go by the name of revolution. To say that emotions which are not fused with
intelligence are blind is tautology.In-tense Intense emotion may utter itself in action that destroys
institutions. But the only assurance of birth of better ones is the marriage of emotion with
intelligence.

Criticism of the commitment of religion to the supernatural is thus positive in import. All modes of
human association are"af-fected "affected with a public interest," and full realization of this interest
is equivalent to a sense of a significance that is religious in its function. The objection to
supernaturalism is that it stands in the way of an effective realization of the sweep and depth of
theim-plications implications of natural human relations. It stands in the way of using the means
that are in our power to make radical changes in these relations. It is certainly true that great
material changes might be made with no corresponding improvement of aspirit-ual spiritual or ideal
nature. But development in the latter directioncan-not cannot be introduced from without; it
cannot be brought about by dressing up material and economic changes with decorationsde-rived
derived from the supernatural. It can come only from more intense realization of values that inhere
in the actual connections ofhu-man human beings with one another. The attempt to segregate
theim-plicit implicit public interest and social value of all institutions and social arrangements in a
particular organization is a fatal diversion.

Were men and women actuated throughout the length and breadth of human relations with the
faith and ardor that have at times marked historic religions the consequences would beincal-culable.
incalculable. To achieve this faith and lan is no easy task. Butreli-gions religions have attempted
something similar, directed moreoverto-ward toward a less promising objectthe supernatural. It
does not become those who hold that faith may move mountains to deny in advance the possibility
of its manifestation on the basis ofveri-fiable

54

verifiable realities. There already exists, though in a rudimentary form, the capacity to relate social
conditions and events to their causes, and the ability will grow with exercise. There is thetech-nical
technical skill with which to initiate a campaign for social health and sanity analogous to that made in
behalf of physical public health. Human beings have impulses toward affection, compassion and
justice, equality and freedom. It remains to weld all these things together. It is of no use merely to
assert that the intrenched foes of class interest and power in high places are hostile to thereal-
ization realization of such a union. As I have already said, if this enemy did not exist, there would be
little sense in urging any policy of change. The point to be grasped is that, unless one gives up the
whole struggle as hopeless, one has to choose betweenalter-natives. alternatives. One alternative is
dependence upon the supernatural; the other, the use of natural agencies.

There is then no sense, logical or practical, in pointing out the difficulties that stand in the way of the
latter course, until the question of the alternative is faced. If it is faced, it will also be realized that
one factor in the choice is dependence uponenlist-ing enlisting only those committed to the
supernatural and alliance with all men and women who feel the stir of social emotion, including the
large number of those who, consciously or unconsciously, have turned their backs upon the
supernatural. Those who face the alternatives will also have to choose between a continued and
even more systematic laissez faire depreciation of intelligence and the resources of natural
knowledge and understanding, and conscious and organized effort to turn the use of these means
from narrow ends, personal and class, to larger human purposes. They will have to ask, as far as they
nominally believe in the need for radical social change, whether what they accomplish when they
point with one hand to the seriousness of present evils is not undone when the other hand points
away from man and nature for their remedy.

The transfer of idealizing imagination, thought and emotion to natural human relations would not
signify the destruction of churches that now exist. It would rather offer the means for are-covery
recovery of vitality. The fund of human values that are prized and that need to be cherished, values
that are satisfied and rectified by all human concerns and arrangements, could be celebrated

55

and reinforced, in different ways and with differing symbols, by the churches. In that way the
churches would indeed become catholic. The demand that churches show a more active interest in
social affairs, that they take a definite stand upon suchques-tions questions as war, economic
injustice, political corruption, that they stimulate action for a divine kingdom on earth, is one of the
signs of the times. But as long as social values are related to a supernatural for which the churches
stand in some peculiar way, there is an inherent inconsistency between the demand and efforts to
execute it. On the one hand, it is urged that the churches are going outside their special province
when they involvethem-selves themselves in economic and political issues. On the other hand, the
very fact that they claim if not a monopoly of supreme values and motivating forces, yet a unique
relation to them, makes itimpos-sible impossible for the churches to participate in promotion of
social ends on a natural and equal human basis. The surrender of claims to an exclusive and
authoritative position is a sine qua non fordo-ing doing away with the dilemma in which churches
now findthem-selves themselves in respect to their sphere of social action.
At the outset, I referred to an outstanding historic fact. The coincidence of the realm of social
interests and activities with a tribal or civic community has vanished. Secular interests andac-tivities
activities have grown up outside of organized religions and arein-dependent independent of their
authority. The hold of these interests upon the thoughts and desires of men has crowded the social
importance of organized religions into a corner and the area of this corner is decreasing. This change
either marks a terrible decline inevery-thing everything that can justly be termed religious in value,
in traditional religions, or it provides the opportunity for expansion of these qualities on a new basis
and with a new outlook. It is impossible to ignore the fact that historic Christianity has been
committed to a separation of sheep and goats; the saved and the lost; the elect and the mass.
Spiritual aristocracy as well as laissez faire with respect to natural and human intervention, is deeply
embedded in its traditions. Lip serviceoften more than lip servicehas been given to the idea of
the common brotherhood of all men. But those outside the fold of the church and those who do not
rely upon belief in the supernatural have been regarded as only potential brothers, still requiring
adoption into the family. Ican-not

56

cannot understand how any realization of the democratic ideal as a vital moral and spiritual ideal in
human affairs is possiblewith-out without surrender of the conception of the basic division to which
supernatural Christianity is committed. Whether or no we are, save in some metaphorical sense, all
brothers, we are at least all in the same boat traversing the same turbulent ocean. Thepoten-tial
potential religious significance of this fact is infinite.

In the opening chapter I made a distinction between religion and the religious. I pointed out that
religionor religionsis charged with beliefs, practices and modes of organization that have accrued
to and been loaded upon the religious element in experience by the state of culture in which
religions havedevel-oped. developed. I urged that conditions are now ripe for emancipation of the
religious quality from accretions that have grown up about it and that limit the credibility and the
influence of religion. In the second chapter, I developed this idea with respect to the faith in ideals
that is immanent in the religious value of experience, and asserted that the power of this faith would
be enhanced werebe-lief belief freed from the conception that the significance and validity of the
ideal are bound up with intellectual assent to the proposition that the ideal is already embodied in
some supernatural ormeta-physical metaphysical sense in the very framework of existence.

The matter touched upon in the present chapter includes within itself all that has been previously set
forth. It does so upon both its negative and positive sides. The community of causes andcon-
sequences consequences in which we, together with those not born, areen-meshed enmeshed is
the widest and deepest symbol of the mysterious totality of being the imagination calls the universe.
It is the embodiment for sense and thought of that encompassing scope of existence the intellect
cannot grasp. It is the matrix within which our ideal aspirations are born and bred. It is the source of
the values that the moral imagination projects as directive criteria and asshap-ing shaping purposes.

The continuing life of this comprehensive community ofbe-ings beings includes all the significant
achievement of men in science and art and all the kindly offices of intercourse andcommunica-tion.
communication. It holds within its content all the material that givesverifi-able verifiable intellectual
support to our ideal faiths. A "creed" founded on this material will change and grow, but it cannot be
shaken.

57

What it surrenders it gives up gladly because of new light and not as a reluctant concession. What it
adds, it adds because new knowledge gives further insight into the conditions that bear upon the
formation and execution of our life purposes. A one- sided psychology, a reflex of eighteenth-century
"individualism," treated knowledge as an accomplishment of a lonely mind. We should now be aware
that it is a product of the cooperative and communicative operations of human beings living together.
Its communal origin is an indication of its rightful communal use. The unification of what is known at
any given time, not upon an impossible eternal and abstract basis but upon that of its bearing upon
the unification of human desire and purpose, furnishes a sufficient creed for human acceptance, one
that would provide a religious release and reinforcement of knowledge.

"Agnosticism" is a shadow cast by the eclipse of thesupernatu-ral. supernatural. Of course,

acknowledgment that we do not know what we do not know is a necessity of all intellectual integrity.
Butgener-alized generalized agnosticism is only a halfway elimination of thesupernatu-ral.
supernatural. Its meaning departs when the intellectual outlook is directed wholly to the natural
world. When it is so directed, there are plenty of particular matters regarding which we must say we
do not know; we only inquire and form hypotheses which futurein-quiry inquiry will confirm or
reject. But such doubts are an incident of faith in the method of intelligence. They are signs of faith,
not of a pale and impotent skepticism. We doubt in order that we may find out, not because some
inaccessible supernatural lurks behind whatever we can know. The substantial background of
practical faith in ideal ends is positive and outreaching.

The considerations put forward in the present chapter may be summed up in what they imply. The
ideal ends to which weat-tach attach our faith are not shadowy and wavering. They assumecon-
crete concrete form in our understanding of our relations to one another and the values contained in
these relations. We who now live are parts of a humanity that extends into the remote past,
ahuman-ity humanity that has interacted with nature. The things in civilization we most prize are
not of ourselves. They exist by grace of the doings and sufferings of the continuous human
community in which we are a link. Ours is the responsibility of conserving, transmitting, rectifying
and expanding the heritage of values we have received

58

that those who come after us may receive it more solid andse-cure, secure, more widely accessible
and more generously shared than we have received it. Here are all the elements for a religious faith
that shall not be confined to sect, class, or race. Such a faith has always been implicitly the common
faith of mankind. It remains to make it explicit and militant.